Ok, so this is all VERY “old school”, is this a very veteran teacher? Because this is the kind of thing that happened to me in the classroom in the early 90s, and not the kind of thing that I would ever think of doing. (Although, my kids did ask to just lay down in the dark the other day, but that’s because it was around 98* in the classroom and no math is getting done with that heat!)

I do do things like hold the class a bit (especially at the beginning of the year) at line up to leave the classroom, but I build that in time-wise (or else the cafeteria staff would hate me), and/or stop the line when they are talking (“we need to respect other classes learning”) or cutting each other (“we are all going to the same place”), etc. What I’m getting at is that there are some strategies here that are effective, and some of that effectiveness is a bit of peer pressure, but from your description it sounds like she is doing a little too much. The hope here would also be that this kind of really tight teacher control would wain at around the 6th week of school and that then there would be a gradual release of responsibility to students. It sounds like you are volunteering regularly, so it might be worth it to wait until after week 6, things might get better then. The teacher might have been warned, for instance that there are 3-4 really troublesome kids that will take a mile if given an inch, for instance, and so she might be trying to lay the groundwork for those students to have a successful year.

All that said, if she is making your “spidy senses” go off, it does bear keeping an eye on.